SIMPLER

Research Project, 2023 – 2028

The Swedish Infrastructure for Medical Population-Based Life-Course and Environmental Research (SIMPLER) was established >30 years ago. It includes data and biospecimens from 110,000 women and men born 1914-1952, and living in Uppsala, Västmanland and Örebro Regions.
The infrastructure has repeat questionnaire-based lifestyle data and regularly updated information on health status and drug use through record linkage to 20 national patient and quality registries. Ongoing repeat examinations have been performed in subcohorts with body composition scans, functional tests, sampling of blood, urine, fat and feces, and DNA from 50,000 participants. Over the last few years, SIMPLER has been enriched by genomics, proteomics, and untargeted metabolomics, and will soon add microbiome data. Four universities – Uppsala, Örebro, Chalmers and Karolinska – maintain the infrastructure, but with its long tradition of data sharing and harmonization, users are found at many other national and international institutions as well. The infrastructure has 2,500,000 person-years of observation with no loss to follow-up, and extensive high-quality phenotypic data with 4500 variables/participant (excluding omics). Using both data- and hypothesis-driven research, the wealth of data will facilitate personalized medicine, translational studies, and drug target identification, to support reducing incidence of chronic and acute late onset disease, and improving their treatment and prognosis. We now apply for maintenance and further development of this well-functioning mature infrastructure, through additional questionnaire information and clinical examinations, enrichment with exceptional omics-data from a wide range of biological samples, additional large-scale collection of blood and stool samples, as well as database sharing costs and biobank operation. SIMPLER provides a unique longitudinal cohort infrastructure for cutting-edge research in medicine.